Digital Medicine

 

  • Digital medicine, digital health, mobile health (mHealth), telemedicine are relatively new terms describing applications of mobile software, internet and wearables for medical and health purposes.
  • Did you know that a mobile app BlueStar™ is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a medical treatment for patients with type 2 diabetes? BlueStar™ is a medical mobile app (developed by WellDoc™), illustrating an example of digital medicine.

  • Did you know that video games also become digital medicine, for example FDA-cleared MusicGlove™ and Jintronix’s game for stroke therapy? Companies like Akili Interactive Labs, Click Therapeutics and Pear Therapeutics are creating software-based therapies for autism, ADHD, addiction, depression and other chronic medical conditions.

  • Did you know that music, digital technologies and medicine go hand-in-hand? For example, The Sync Project is developing music as precision medicine delivered via mobile apps. Music and Memory, through the personalized music playlists, was recently shown to improve behavioral outcomes in elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia (Thomas et al, Am J Geriatr Psychiatry 2017).
  • Here is our publication describing how to “package” music into digital medicine for depression, anxiety and bipolar:journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpubh.2016.00217/full

  • Challenge #5: Digital technologies change rapidly, developing therapies takes time, regulatory requirements vary from country to country, people like different music genres, videos, podcast etc. Can digital libraries, APIs (information programming interface), information retrieval systems and streaming algorithms reconcile all these challenges?